My experience with Home Assistant, Aeotec Z-Stick 7, and Inovelli Red Dimmers.

bp2008

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I moved to a bigger house this summer and wanted remote control of many of the lights, like I'd had in my previous home.

My old system was Z-wave, mainly consisting of Evolve and GE dimmers controlled by a Vera controller. My only complaints were:

1. The Vera controller would sometimes stop responding and need power cycled. Eventually my first Vera died, and the newer model ended up being much worse in this regard.
2. The dimmers were a bit janky with their ramp rates and were not very configurable.

So this time around I decided to use Home Assistant software running on a Raspberry Pi 3, with an Aeotec Z-Stick 7 which is a tiny USB stick Z-wave controller. For switches, I bought a 10-pack of Inovelli Red dimmers.

I've had a lot of trouble with the new system. It was slow and often z-wave commands would just time out. This was never an issue with my Vera controllers, where devices would just respond instantly. I moved the pi which was acting as Z-wave controller, but even just a few feet away from the switches it would not work well. So I decided to install Home Assistant in a virtual machine on one of my servers, and connect the Z-Stick there. At first the Z-wave communication did not work at all, but I moved the Z-Stick to a better position using an active USB extension cable. This resolved 95% of the communication issues. Devices respond instantly, usually. Occasionally a packet still times out (which basically freezes all Z-wave communication until the timeout completes) but this is a lot better. It is not quite matching the excellent performance of my old Vera-based system unfortunately, but I did have a much smaller house then so devices were closer together.

Though the Home Assistant / Z-Stick controller leaves a little to be desired, I am very happy with the Inovelli Red dimmers. As far as I can tell, they are the pinnacle of Z-wave dimmer technology, highly configurable, and you can even update their firmware over the air with a new enough Z-wave controller. Each Inovelli Red dimmer switch has an RGB LED light bar and an extra button which can be used to trigger scenes and stuff in Home Assistant.
 

eggsan

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thanks for providing such valuable information. My experience with zwave products are so-so unreliable. I’m currently using Lutron Caseta, controlled through an smart bridge. It’s quite reliable, but you may need to consider the distance/quantity of switches within the radio coverage. If needed, you may add a repeater. I love the idea (including my wife) of adding pico- remotes as an extra-anywhere wireless control

 

bp2008

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I choose Z-wave mainly because it has a pretty big ecosystem and there are still lots of z-wave controllers that don't operate in the cloud.

I love the idea (including my wife) of adding pico- remotes as an extra-anywhere wireless control
Nice. I like the look of those remotes.

My solution for remote controllers gives a lot more buttons for the money, but requires a bigger initial investment and is more complicated. I actually use wireless numpads from Amazon hooked up to a raspberry pi. I got some keycap stickers and draw my own labels on them. The pi runs custom software I wrote (available on github) which lets me bind any key to any action. So it is like $50-$70 for the pi, power supply, SD card, network cable, plus $10-20 per numpad, and that gives about 16 programmable buttons and uses standard AAA battery which lasts a very long time.
 
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